Sharif Digital Repository

The problem of Rapid Transit Network Design (RTND) is studied in this paper. Due to the noticeable contribution of rapid transit lines in public transportation network of large urban areas, this problem is interesting to the transportation specialists. On the other hand, the success stories of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in different countries have motivated us to study BRT network planning. BRT systems can be developed with less investment costs and construction time in comparison with rail-based systems. Therefore, planning Bus Rapid Transit lines, either to develop a new rapid transit network or extend a current one can be an interesting research topic. This problem, like other... 

Demand responsive feeder transit can minimize passengers’ travel times and operator's costs by optimizing routing based on real demand. One question about the demand response feeder transit operation is whether it can be optimized with door-to-door service or with temporary stops for picking up and delivering passengers. Obviously, door-to-door service eliminates passengers’ walking distances, but it increases passenger in-vehicle travel times and vehicle operating distance and costs. On the other hand, demand responsive feeder transit with temporary stops, which designates the temporary locations picking up and dropping passengers, minimizes bus operating distance and time as well as... 

The simultaneous emergence of several abrupt disease outbreaks or the extinction of some serotypes of multistrain diseases are fingerprints of the interaction between pathogens spreading within the same population. Here, we propose a general and versatile benchmark to address the unfolding of both cooperative and competitive interacting diseases. We characterize the explosive transitions between the disease-free and the epidemic regimes arising from the cooperation between pathogens and show the critical degree of cooperation needed for the onset of such abrupt transitions. For the competing diseases, we characterize the mutually exclusive case and derive analytically the transition point... 

We have studied the electrical and magnetic properties of normal and superconducting states of RuGd1.6Ce0.4Sr 2Cu2O10-δ (Ru-1222) system, prepared by the standard solid-state reaction technique, with applied magnetic field. The resistivity curves show that at high temperature the system is paramagnetic. At lower temperature, we can observe two magnetic transitions from paramagnetic state to anti-ferromagnetic and from anti-ferromagnetic to ferromagnetic. At room temperature the resistivity of sample shows insulating behavior and superconducting transition occurs at 45 K. Superconducting and magnetic parameters such as superconducting transition temperature Tc, magnetic transition Tirr, have... 

A new approach to Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is presented. The idea is based on the fact that two images are similar if their structural relationship within their blocks is preserved. To this end, a transition matrix is defined which exploits structural transitions between corresponding blocks of two images. The matrix contains valuable information about differences of two images, which should be transformed to a quality index. Eigen-value analysis over the transition matrix leads to a new distance measure called Eigen-gap. According to simulation results, the Eigen-gap is not only highly correlated to subjective scores but also, its performance is as good as the SSIM, a trustworthy... 

The physical properties including glass transition temperature and permeability behavior of clay-filled epoxies are reviewed in this chapter. There is no consensus in the literature on how nanoclay affects the α-relaxation temperature in epoxy systems. This perhaps rises from the complexity of nanoclay morphology in polymeric resins and the interphase properties since morphology of nanoclay and interphase characteristics are two key parameters to control the glass transition process in epoxy nanocomposites. In addition, the possible existence of several α-transitions in montmorillonite-filled epoxies due to the existence of several relaxation domains may account for the controversial... 

Improving the service quality of the public transport systems has always been an interesting research area in the field of transportation planning. Public transit system expansion and enhancement has been known as a recognized way to improve congested metropolitan areas. In order to make a transit system more attractive to people, both long and short term management strategies should be considered. Fleet re-assignment to a bus network, a noticeable component of the public transit system, was the focus of this study. It was introduced as a short term management strategy to help the operators maintain service quality without confusing the users by abrupt changes in the system. The proposed... 

We investigate both pure and mixed states Floquet dynamical quantum phase transition (DQPT) in the periodically time-dependent extended XY model. We exactly show that the proposed Floquet Hamiltonian of interacting spins can be expressed as a sum of noninteracting quasispins imposed by an effective time dependent magnetic field (Schwinger-Rabi model). The calculated Chern number indicates that there is a topological transition from the nonadiabatic to adiabatic regime. In the adiabatic regime, the quasispins trace the time dependent effective magnetic field and then oscillate between spin up and down states. While in the nonadiabatic regime, the quasispins cannot follow the time dependent... 

We have studied the phase diagram and entanglement of the one-dimensional Ising model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. We have applied the quantum renormalization-group (QRG) approach to get the stable fixed points, critical point, and the scaling of coupling constants. This model has two phases: antiferromagnetic and saturated chiral ones. We have shown that the staggered magnetization is the order parameter of the system and DM interaction produces the chiral order in both phases. We have also implemented the exact diagonalization (Lanczos) method to calculate the static structure factors. The divergence of structure factor at the ordering momentum as the size of systems goes... 

Although demand responsive feeder bus operation is possible with human-driven vehicles, it has not been very popular and is mostly available as a special service because of its high operating costs due to intensive labor costs as well as requirement for advanced real-time information technology and complicated operation. However, once automated vehicles become available, small-sized flexible door-to-door feeder bus operation will become more realistic, so preparing for such automated flexible feeder services is necessary to take advantage of the rapid improvement of automated vehicle technology. Therefore, in this research, an algorithm for optimal flexible feeder bus routing, which... 

We generalize an already proposed protocol for quantum state transfer to spin chains of arbitrary spin. An arbitrary unknown d -level state is transferred through a chain with rather good fidelity by the natural dynamics of the chain. We compare the performance of this protocol for various values of d. A by-product of our study is a much simpler method for picking up the state at the destination as compared with the one proposed previously. We also discuss entanglement distribution through such chains and show that the quality of entanglement transition increases with the number of levels d. © 2007 The American Physical Society  

The effect on the thermal parameters of superconducting transition-edge bolometers produced on a single crystalline SrTiO3 (STO) substrate with and without a CeO2 buffer layer was investigated. Metal-organic deposition was used to deposit the 20-nm CeO2 buffer layer, whereas RF magnetron sputtering was applied to fabricate 150-nm-thick superconducting YBa2Cu3O7-δ (YBCO) thin film. The critical transition temperature for both of the YBCO films was 90 K, and the transition width was ∼1.9 K. The bolometers fabricated from these samples were characterized with respect to the voltage phase and amplitude responses, and the results were compared with that of simulations conducted by applying a... 

The evolution of a two-state quantum system (a spin 1/2 particle) in both the framework of standard quantum mechanics and under the decoherence regime is considered. The former approach on this issue is the well-known quantum flipping process of a dichotomic system subjected to a time-dependent magnetic field. In the latter approach, the Spin-Boson model is utilized to describe the interaction of system with its environment and the Born-Markov master equation is derived to obtain the decoherence time. It is possible to show that under certain conditions, one may find a potential conflict between the predictions of decoherence theory and the result observed in a typical quantum flipping... 

Flow mediated dilation (FMD) is a non-invasive method for endothelial function assessment providing an index extracted from ultrasonic B-mode images. Although utilized in the research community, the difficulty of its application and high cost of ultrasonic devices prevent it from being widely used in clinical settings. In this study we show that substituting the ultrasonic device with more easily handled and low cost photoplethysmography and electrocardiography is possible. We introduce new indices based on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) and show that they are correlated with the ultrasound-based FMD Index. To this end, a conventional ultrasound FMD test was carried... 

We present a detailed calculation of the linear and nonlinear optical response of four types of monolayer two-dimensional (2D) transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), having the formula MX2 with M = Mo, W and X = S, Se. The calculations are based on 6-band tight-binding model of TMDCs, and then performing a semi-classical perturbation analysis of response functions. We numerically calculate the linear and nonlinear surface susceptibility tensors with ωΣ = ωr + ωs + ωt. Both non-degenerate and degenerate cases are studied for third-harmonic generation and nonlinear refractive index, respectively. Computational results obtained with no external fitting parameters are discussed regarding two... 

This letter considers the use of total variation (TV) minimization in the recovery of a given gradient sparse vector from Gaussian linear measurements. It has been shown in recent studies that there exists a sharp phase transition behavior in TV minimization for the number of measurements necessary to recover the signal in asymptotic regimes. The phase-transition curve specifies the boundary of success and failure of TV minimization for large number of measurements. It is a challenging task to obtain a theoretical bound that reflects this curve. In this letter, we present a novel upper bound that suitably approximates this curve and is asymptotically sharp. Numerical results show that our... 

The infinite projected entangled-pair state (iPEPS) algorithm is one of the most efficient techniques for studying the ground-state properties of two-dimensional quantum lattice Hamiltonians in the thermodynamic limit. Here, we show how the algorithm can be adapted to explore nearest-neighbor local Hamiltonians on the ruby and triangle-honeycomb lattices, using the corner transfer matrix (CTM) renormalization group for 2D tensor network contraction. Additionally, we show how the CTM method can be used to calculate the ground-state fidelity per lattice site and the boundary density operator and entanglement entropy (EE) on an infinite cylinder. As a benchmark, we apply the iPEPS method to the... 

Titanium trisulfide (TiS3), a transition metal chalcogenide, bears the potential to replace silicon, when taking the form of nanoflakes, due to its favorable band gap and optical response. In this paper, we investigate the response of TiS3 nanoflakes to gas detection through a careful quantum computational approach and a few succinct measurements. The computations are benchmarked and compared with a relevant experiment at each step, where their results/conclusions are discussed. The most stable surface of TiS3 particles is determined as (001), in agreement with the literature. The adsorption of 5 gas molecules is characterized through formulating and estimating their adsorption intensity... 

It has been shown that a macroscopic system being in a high-temperature thermal coherent state can be, in principle, driven into a non-classical state by coupling to a microscopic system. Therefore, thermal coherent states do not truly represent the classical limit of quantum description. Here, we study the classical limit of quantum state of a more relevant macroscopic system, namely the pointer of a detector, after the phase-preserving linear amplification process. In particular, we examine to what extent it is possible to find the corresponding amplified state in a superposition state, by coupling the pointer to a qubit system. We demonstrate quantitatively that the amplification process...